TP#8 Alice

       Last night I met with Neto for our second tutoring session this week. My young tutee, Jun, is out on vacation this week, but luckily, Neto was more than happy to meet twice. I had intended on using this session as a group tutoring opportunity. However, one of my conversation partners texted me before the session to let me know that they would not be able to make it, because something had come up. Luckily, the lesson that I had planned to do as a pair activity could easily be adapted to individual work.

       For this session, I used my speaking lesson plan that I created for class on the topic of complaining politely. I introduced the words complain and complaint. For the schema building activity, I introduced courtesy words and phrases which are as follows: “Please”, “Excuse me”, “Pardon Me”, “I am sorry to bother you but”, “Would”, “Could”, “Thank you”, “Do you mind”. I also asked Neto to share past stories about when he experienced situations in which he needed to complain. What did he say? How did he feel? After we reviewed the vocabulary, I asked him to read a situation that I typed up the night before. (I wrote two stories, both of which included some element of soccer, in which someone needed to complain. I included a sample dialogue of the complaint.) Neto seemed to really like the stories.  For each story, I asked him to first read it silently. Afterwards, I read it aloud while he circled any unfamiliar words so that we could discuss them. For one of the stories, a dialogue using the vocabulary was provided. For the other story, a dialogue was not provided, and I asked him to write his own dialogue for it using the dialogue from the first story as a guide. Finally, I asked him to write his own situation and to provide a dialogue using the courtesy words and phrases. After we completed each story, I would make sure that we reviewed it so that he understood what was happening. For each story, I acted out alternative situations that might have arisen if the complaint was made in a rude manner. He thought this was hilarious. Neto worked very hard throughout the session. He was attentive and responded well to the activities. It felt really good to see one of my lesson plans come to life.